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Free keywords:
Cognitive decline, Mild cognitive impairment, Neurovitalis, Parkinson’s disease, Diagnostic marker, electroencephalogram, non-pharmacological, intervention, physical activity
Abstract:
Background Cognitive decline is a major factor for the deterioration of the quality of life in patients suffering from
Parkinson’s disease (PD). Recently, it was reported that cognitive training (CT) in PD patients with mild cognitive
impairment (PD-MCI) led to an increase of physical activity (PA) accompanied by improved executive function (EF).
Moreover, PA has been shown to alter positively brain function and cognitive abilities in PD. Both observations
suggest an interaction between CT and PA.
Objectives A previous multicenter (MC) study was slightly significant when considering independent effects
of interventions (CT and PA) on EF. Here, we use MC constituent single center data that showed no effect of
interventions on EF. Thus, this exploratory study considers pooling data from both interventions to gain insight into
a recently reported interaction between CT and PA and provide a proof of principle for the usefulness of resting state
EEG as a neurophysiological biomarker of joint intervention’s effect on EF and attention in PD-MCI.
Methods Pre- and post-intervention resting state EEG and neuropsychological scores (EF and attention) were
obtained from 19 PD-MCI patients (10 (CT) and 9 (PA)). We focused our EEG analysis on frontal cortical areas due to
their relevance on cognitive function.
Results We found a significant joint effect of interventions on EF and a trend on attention, as well as trends for the
negative correlation between attention and theta power (pre), the positive correlation between EF and alpha power
(post) and a significant negative relationship between attention and theta power over time (post-pre).
Conclusions Our results support the role of theta and alpha power at frontal areas as a biomarker for the therapeutic
joint effect of interventions
